This year’s CES provided much of what we expected and (as usual) a few surprises.
Trends: As opposed to individual stand-out products, I find it interesting to look for trends that appeared in multiple locations. Here are the trends that caught my eye.
1. Expected Trend: As expected, there were 4k TV (or alternately called Ultra HD) everywhere. Admittedly, the pictures can be amazing, however I still doubt there are near term reasons for the average consumer to upgrade. The format is impressive and there seem to be two reasons that (aside from commercial uses) will drive sales. The first is that for screens larger that about 80” there is a marked difference between HD and UHD. The second is 3D. Although 3D TV has failed to take off, there is no denying the impact of films in 3D. The benefit of UHD is that with 3D you get a full HD picture for each eye as opposed to half resolution with regular HD. The other piece of data that came from all of the Ultra HD displays is that up-converted Blu-ray looks great on an UHD set. In fact, many of the UHD sets on the floor were shown using up-converted Blu-ray. The take away here is that Blu-ray has a much longer future as the dominant physical medium than we otherwise might have suspected.
LG Ultra HD TV (4K TV)
2. New Trend: One trend that was new this year was high quality Bluetooth speakers. In previous cycles we’ve seen Bluetooth used for headphones and game controllers, but this year there were a significant number of high quality speakers that you can pair with your phone or other music player. The concept here is that you can move the speaker around (i.e. outside or to the garage) or just leave it on the nightstand to playback high quality music from the device you carry with you all of the time. I’d expect to see more of these speakers going forward. In the future we may have one (or a pair) in every room.
3. Trend in Search of a Need: This year’s technology in search of a need was augmented reality. A number of organizations showcased augmented technology solutions that used tablets or phones to add animation to still objects or add virtual detail to the real world. The challenge here is that none of the displays I saw had any business case or hint of financial purpose. I have no doubt that eventually there will be a good business case… but we haven’t seen one yet.
4. Growing Trend: The internet of things continues to grow. In previous years we’ve seen networked refrigerators and light bulbs and this year just about everything on the show floor included and wi-fi or Bluetooth chip. The future is clear… everything will feed data to everything else. Now we just need the bandwidth to handle it and the systems to manage it.
5. Not Ready for Prime-time Trend: It may be true that 3D printers will soon change the world… but right now about all they can do it make bright colored plastic desk toys. It is impressive that a drawing on a computer can be rendered in 3D but, we seem to be a ways off from being able to render things that can actually be used.
A couple of particular items that caught my attention (for good or bad) were:
- My favorite new technology was the ability to use the horizontal and vertical polarization of passive glasses 3DTV to allow two different viewers to see two different views on the same TV (one viewer has two vertical lenses and the other has two horizontal lenses). The most interesting use was for gaming. In the demo I saw, two players were playing a driving game where each player saw their own car’s view while looking at the same screen. This is a technology that I expect to see commercialized in the next year or two.
- One interesting device was essentially a window washing robot. It actually stuck to (and climbed) the window while washing the glass. I’m not sure it will ever catch on, but it was a cool idea.
- The worst new product had to be the potty seat (for training) with a built in iPad case. Seriously, a $600 piece of technology probably isn’t necessary in order to stop using diapers. And if you can afford an iPad for that purpose… perhaps you could just hire someone to potty train your child instead.
Winbot 7 – Window-washing robot
Commentary provided and by Mitchell Weinraub, the Vice President of Product with Blockbuster, LLC. Material originally posted on his blog at http://tvtopics.wordpress.com/.
Hi, I work for Dish and the augmented reality technology is being used by some installers for site assessments when installing satellites. Holding your device to the sky, it will show you the arc and help determine best line of sight for optimum signal reliability.
Another application is for traveling, you hold your device towards the street, monument, restaurants, etc and you receive information about the subject or perhaps points of interest are discovered you weren’t aware of. Content discovery for the real world.
In Blockbuster’s case, you could walk into a store, or point at several stores in an area and instantly see promotions the stores may be doing, if you like those promotions, you could “see inside” to get more info on those promotions or as you walk in to the store, you can see product availability, new items that have arrived, flash sales, etc. Employee roles could evolve to be more customer centric by becoming content/customer advisors. Personally, I like speaking to blockbuster employees even though I already know what ratings a movie gets, seen the trailer, and have several titles in my mind, but what I don’t get from all that data is a personal experience.
For example, I can’t be on every blog, every feed, every news site all the time, but when I went to a blockbuster recently, an employee knew of a small comic show going on I wasn’t aware of, and several months back it was a film festival, and when I saw a food centric film recently, the employee knew of a restaurant nearby that I would’ve never found or looked for otherwise.
In a B2B application, it could be used to send retail stores a visual merchandising planogram, depending on size of store, layout, etc.
We all use the internet, but there’s something about actual human interaction combined with technology that I feel is lacking in the retail experience. I like blogs and forums, but I’ve been “online” for almost 20 years and consider myself a technophile, but I look forward to actually walking into a store that I like because it’s fun to interact with human beings from time to time, especially if they’re versatile and knowledgeable on several different topics.
With augmented reality it would draw me to the items I’m interested in, but with a versatile customer centric employee, they can make my shopping “experience” personal and fun. ;)
Sorry for the long post, didn’t realize paragraph breaks aren’t recognized without the anchors.